


The Garden of Earthly Delights

by briarcreature



Category: Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Canon Era, Friendship, Gen, Recreational Drug Use, weird mutual crushes on the most heavy handedly Symbolic guy you both know
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-16
Updated: 2019-08-16
Packaged: 2020-09-01 19:28:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,818
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20263318
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/briarcreature/pseuds/briarcreature
Summary: Jehan Prouvaire and Grantaire smoke hashish. Prouvaire mis-remembers a painting by Hieronymus Bosch and comes to a startling/absurd conclusion about someone they both know.





	The Garden of Earthly Delights

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pelides](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pelides/gifts).

The smoke swirled down his throat. The smoke swirled around inside of his mouth and back out through his lips. Jehan Prouvaire watched it flow into the air of his room like a white river, an errant ghost. He leaned back a little into the cushions he kept in piles upon the floor, in the style (he fancied) of an Arabian or Chinese gentleman.

_An errant ghost_, he thought. That wasn’t bad, perhaps. It was a poignant turn of phrase, if not especially daring. He would, of course, want to apply it to something loftier than hashish and tobacco smoke...

Beside him, a little to his front and left, Grantaire coughed. He made a terrible, scrunched-up gargoyle face and put the pipe down to clap himself on the chest with his hand; the other was supporting him, half-supine, on its elbow.

Jehan frowned in vague concern. “Are you all right?” he asked the other man. Grantaire was not his most preferred companion in this sort of creative stimulation, but Jehan did not like to partake alone, and while his friend was primarily a devotee of the bottle over anything else, he never turned down an offer of whatever dream-inducing substance might be on hand.

Grantaire snorted. “This smoke finds my body too coarse to enter without a struggle, it seems,” he grumbled. “The clay of my flesh has no pretensions to mysticism or inspiration; I’ve barely mastered respiration. You, on the contrary, with your literary lungs expanding like flowers...”

“You can still speak, then.” Jehan cut him off, amused. “Take a moment to recover. Allow it to penetrate your mind.” He closed his eyes. “Try to be quiet. Let the words flow through you, but not escape from your mouth. It helps.”

Jehan had not realized until that moment that it was possible to sense another person rolling his eyes when one’s own were shut. For the time being, though, Grantaire seemed to be heeding his advice. Jehan took deep, measured breaths as the smoke swirled up to fill the space inside his skull with an intricate thicket of red and green and blue, the threads of a tapestry seen dizzyingly close up. The threads fell softly away and left a calm bubble inside his head, a smooth, still space tinged with the deep amber color of hashish resin. He hummed to himself.

_What shall be the subject of my next poem, then?_ he asked the infinite, by way of the calm amber bubble. _I am waiting, I am watching, I am listening, I am open to your call._

The image of a pair of human buttocks, disembodied but clenched around the mouthpiece of a long trumpet, shimmered into his mind’s eye. Jehan thought he recognized it from a painting he had seen once: a vision of Hell populated by naked men and women, demonic bird-frog-fish creatures, and a gigantic cracked egg. Or perhaps not. In either case...

_I am not quite _that_ open to your call_, he amended to the infinite, guiltily but firmly.

The buttocks squeezed a moist, melancholy note from their instrument and disappeared. Jehan wondered whether they might appear now to Grantaire, who would probably find them more humorous than he did. He heard a noise to his left that might have been a low laugh, or a groan, or a stifled cough.

Jehan turned his focus inward once more. The amber bubble stretched and grew. The emptiness within it began to fill with bits and pieces of memories, half-forgotten sensory impressions from days past: the heads of tall wild poppies nodding in a field, a rivulet of dirty rainwater splitting around a stone in the road, a cloud in the sky that reminded him of a mysterious spiral shell he’d once found as a child, pressed into the rock on the side of a cliff. (He had not grown up near the sea.)

The smell of ink. The smell of wine. A clamor of voices. Bahorel’s flashing teeth when he laughed, a warm sort of bark. Small flecks of paint on Feuilly’s small, narrow hands. Combeferre bent low over his desk while Jehan stood awkwardly in his doorway, scribbling something with his newfangled metal pen and biting his lower lip in concentration.

Jehan smiled. He did not care at all for metal pens, but he cared much for some of the hands that grasped them, some of the words written with their cold, rigid, lifeless tips. There was poetry in his friends, he thought. It was a humble, human sort of poetry, but no less precious than the holy visions of Dante or Isaiah.

Although. Except.

An image of Enjolras appeared in Jehan’s mind, far less fragmented than the others had been. His eyes were like the midday sky in summer, tremendously deep but also very bright. His hair and the skin of his smooth cheek seemed to glow with their own light. A halo, a corona. It was some power that lived inside his flesh leaking out into the air.

Jehan was, of course, aware that Enjolras was uncommonly beautiful. Jehan had always, of course, liked and admired the man for his strength of character, his moral clarity, his ability to transform ideals and dreams into plans of action. But it all struck him now in a new way, with the force of a blow across the face from an enormous, invisible palm. He had been stricken so before while under the influence of hashish, but that had only ever been outdoors, at night, looking up into the far-off, fiery stars.

_I wonder if this is how Grantaire feels whenever he is in Enjolras’s presence_, thought Jehan. He opened his eyes, suddenly keen to ask his friend and to share with him a suspicion that had sprung up, fully formed and terribly convincing, in his smoke-saturated brain. Grantaire was, Jehan reflected, for once the least likely of his friends to dismiss or joke about one of his odd notions. Providential, then, that Jehan had his company today, and not Bahorel’s or Courfeyrac’s!

Grantaire was lying on his back, his head on a cushion, his hands loosely folded over his stomach. His mouth was slightly open, and he stared at Jehan’s ceiling with enormously dilated pupils. His eyes appeared night-black. While drink always made him more garrulous, hashish tended to soften him a bit, even quiet him if he wasn’t given a conversational lead.

“Grantaire,” said Jehan. He moved closer to his friend and loosely grasped his shoulder. “Grantaire. Listen. I’ve had a revelation.”

“Another one?” muttered Grantaire. “Well, for that matter, so have I. A voice sounded thunderous and commanding, audible to my ears alone, and informed me that it’s time to pick up the pipe again. What was yours?”

“Grantaire. Consider this. Angels are messengers. They are wholly good and wholly of that which is beyond the human sphere. They are filled with a divine power. This is why, even when they walk the earth in the form of men, they terrify as well as attract. Do you ever think, Grantaire...”

Grantaire sat up, squinting at Jehan. “No,” he declared in mock-solemnity. “I never think. It’s a dreadful habit. What man with a thought in his head has ever lived happily?”

“But listen! Listen! If angels walked in the form of men through the streets of Sodom and Gomorrah, why not Paris? If the Medieval saints spoke with angels, why not we? Consider our friend Enjolras.”

“Always,” said Grantaire.

“Consider even his _name_. But, moreover, consider him as an individual. How his physical nature accords with his spiritual and moral nature. How they both seem...”

“Flawless,” mumbled Grantaire. “Glowing like pure sunlight through pure ice.”

“I wouldn’t call him ‘icy’,” said Jehan. “But yes. Yes! He’s too perfect to be truly human, don’t you think? And there is something a little terrifying about him, if I’m to be honest. He says his mother is the Republic, and I take him at his word. I’ve met the man he calls his uncle, and the people he calls his cousins, but I cannot imagine him ever having had a human mother and father. Well, perhaps he hasn’t any! And when he speaks, people listen to him, and they hear the truth and righteousness of his words, and they believe him, in a way they do not believe Combeferre, or Courfeyrac, or me. Even you, Grantaire: you say yourself, time and again, that you believe nothing and believe in no one. But I have seen your face when you hear Enjolras speak, when you turn to look upon him.”

Grantaire laughed, snorted, and laughed again. “So this makes you suppose him a bona-fide angel? A wheel of eyes and fire behind a mask of human flesh, like something out of Ezekiel, but burning with a zeal for revolution and for Patria instead of for the word of God?”

“I do not think, in this day and age, that the word of God is necessarily different than the message of the revolution,” said Jehan contemplatively as Grantaire, still laughing, sat up and recovered the pipe.

“My visionary friend,” replied Grantaire as he lit it. “Don’t mistake me: I’ve harbored a similar suspicion myself for, oh, a very long time now. It only makes sense, Enjolras as angel. He’d have to be, to take as little notice of women as he does, with a face like that. Why, I doubt that male Diana has ever once...” Grantaire cut himself off to perform a series of precise, obscene gestures with the hand that wasn’t holding the pipe before taking a very long drag indeed. Then he exhaled a series of lopsided smoke rings.

“I’ve never seen him blow his nose,” he added. “Mark my words, there is no fluid in his corpus; only air, or stars, or molten gold, or...” he sighed, and leaned back on the pillow again. “Or something.”

“You know,” said Jehan, in true wonder, “I’ve never seen him blow his nose, either. Or even cough much, really, though he goes so pale sometimes, and has red around the rims of his eyes, and needs to rest much more often than usual. Perhaps it is not after all a recurring malady of the lungs or sinuses, as Joly says it might be, but the toll of wearing human flesh, of walking among us on this troubled earth.”

“You have something there, Prouvaire,” said Grantaire. “By Saint Agatha’s tits on a tray, you have something there.” He yawned and smiled up at the ceiling once more. Grantaire had, Jehan reflected, an incongruously sweet and charming smile on those rare occasions when it did not display itself as a practiced smirk or leer.

“So,” said Grantaire, “what are you proposing to do with this new revelation? Is it to be the subject of a poem? Poetry is mostly worthless, an odious business, but if any being on this miserable ball of clay ever warranted an ode, a villanelle, a sonnet, or a triolet, it’s surely Enjolras.”

Jehan shook his head slowly. “No,” he said. “No, I don’t think it would be right to reveal his celestial nature to the world in that way.”

“Why the hell not, when his eyes and his voice and the curve of his arm reveal it to the world so eloquently already?”

“I just think that, well, it’s better to let some things retain their veil of mystery. Of ambiguity. Of namelessness. Besides, it would embarrass him.”

“If he ever read it!”

Jehan gave Grantaire’s arm a playful, lazy shove. “Whatever his opinion on poetry in general, you know that Enjolras reads my poems, at least. We are friends, after all. Although,” Jehan sighed, “it’s true that he doesn’t always seem to understand them fully. I suppose he’s rather literal-minded.”

“He only ever sees the truth, undressed, divested of art or lyric.” Grantaire reached out and held Jehan’s hand, squeezed it. “Don’t take it personally. Forget what I said a moment ago; I can appreciate a fine flight of fancy as much as any earthbound man or woman or child or beast, and I find your verses much better than three-quarters of the pretentious, vacuous, rotten-souled nonsense that’s popular nowadays. You’re an original. Nearly prophetic, one might say.” He made another gargoyle face. “Not _me_, of course._ I_ wouldn’t say such a thing. But _someone_ might.”

“High praise, from your mouth,” said Jehan wryly. “Anyway, I shall hold this revelation in my heart as I compose my next poem. I shall be inspired by the mysteries that walk among us, and the presence of angels in our troubled city. But I will refrain from mentioning Enjolras directly, I think. A poem is more powerful when it is not about a specific person, or when the people in it go unnamed; then it can be about everyone.” He settled down on his back beside Grantaire. The cushions were very soft. The ceiling’s plaster was cracked a little in one corner of the room, he noticed, like the egg in the painting of Hell. He wondered what might emerge from such a crack, what bird or frog or flying fish. The sky would hatch from it, perhaps, blue as an eye and huge as the future.

“My god,” said Grantaire. “You really believe it, don’t you. You really, truly believe that he is one of the heavenly host.” It wasn’t a question.

“So do you,” said Jehan.

“You’re insane.”

“No more than you are!”

Grantaire laughed loudly, and after a moment, Jehan joined in. The smoke swirled around the room, white and thick, smelling of hashish and tobacco and, faintly, for some reason, dried chamomile.

***

A few days later, at the Café Musain, Enjolras sat down beside Jehan Prouvaire, who was busy working on a draft of his new poem and alternately accepting and ignoring the loud, enthusiastic suggestions of Bahorel, who was leaning over Jehan’s shoulder to read along as he wrote. So absorbed was Jehan in these intertwined tasks that he didn’t notice Enjolras until a delicate, firm hand touched his arm. Jehan startled, leaving a light splatter of ink across a few words of the poem and the meaty part of his thumb.

“Careful, now!” said Bahorel, at the same moment Enjolras said, “Oh, no. Prouvaire, I beg your pardon.”

“What?” said Jehan. “It’s all right. Please don’t worry. Hello, Enjolras.”

Enjolras looked as angelic as ever, although he seemed to be having one of his pale, red-eyed, stoically weary days. Try as he might, Jehan could not see a pore on Enjolras’s face; he could easily have been the marble statue to which Grantaire often compared him. His hair was a glimmering, curling aura of sunlight. Jehan had not had a conversation with Enjolras since his hashish-inspired revelation, and while he was no longer quite as convinced of its truth as he had been under the influence of the drug, he couldn’t help feeling a little nervous and shy. What if Enjolras knew the thoughts that were going through his head? What if Grantaire had told Bossuet, or Joly, or Courfeyrac, or any other mutual friend about their conversation, and whoever he’d told had then told Enjolras?

“Hello, Prouvaire,” said Enjolras, with a small smile. “Do you have a moment to spare from your poetry? There’s an important task I would greatly appreciate your help with.” He blinked rapidly, and his nostrils flared. He reached up and rubbed his eyes in a strangely childlike, guileless gesture.

“Certainly,” said Jehan. He set down his quill on the table. “What would you like me to do?”

“Combeferre and I have decided that our organization needs—“ Enjolras paused. He had a peculiar facial expression that Jehan had never seen before, although it was no less striking and lovely than any from his usual range of emotion. “Please excuse me.” Enjolras produced a plain, pristine white handkerchief from somewhere and blew his nose into it. Even this gesture didn’t diminish his beauty, but it did make a long, wet honking sound. The noise was no different from that produced by any other person forcing congested snot out of his nose.

“I apologize,” said Enjolras, replacing the handkerchief from whence it came, still sniffling a little. “As I was saying, Prouvaire...” He stopped again. “Why are you laughing, Prouvaire? Surely it wasn’t as loud as all that?”

Bahorel was looking curiously at Jehan, too, his eyebrows arched. Jehan knew that he would have to explain the cause of his sudden fit to him eventually, if not to Enjolras. For now, he was helpless, his back and shoulders shivering with mirth. _But it’s not that this disproves anything_, he thought, _except, perhaps, the commonly held notion that angels can’t get head colds._ And that only made him laugh harder.

Enjolras looked at him, shook his head, and graced him with another small, mysterious smile.

**Author's Note:**

> I've never written Les Mis fanfiction before, and I'm kind of super nervous to post this! Any historical/factual errors that cannot be blamed on the limited knowledge of two somewhat drug-hazy dudes from the 1820s are my own, and I apologize for them.
> 
> If you didn't think the butt trumpet was funny, well, I apologize on nature's behalf for giving you a bad sense of humor. ;)


End file.
